Your motor restoration looks great. I repainted our Mark 55 with PPG Concept polyurethane, with a self-etching primer underneath. We also painted our Zip with this stuff and it's been extremely durable. What's interesting is that the Sand Tan and Quicksilver Green were both 99.99% matches with Ford colors from various years. You might try taking a sample of your Phantom Black to a good automotive paint store to see if they can match it.

Looks great, I also get my decals from nymarine and they are very good, as it say's here the 67 decals were printed on brushed style vinyl to make it appear as if they were on brushed metal so I'd say it would be hard to get good copies elsewhere http://www.nymarine.ca/1967MCDEC.html

soedesh wrote:You might be right and I'll watch to see how it holds up over time. I would like to find an enamel of the phantom black for future work. For now it seems fine.

I do know that laquer over enamel rapidly acts as paint remover.

I believe you are correct. I've not had a problem with urethanes over laquer... but laquer over enamels and such will lift it as if it were paint remover. Although, due to the laquers quick dry characteristics, I have been able to get away with very thin "dust coats", before appying a heavy coat. I also observed that most "2 part" coatings are a lot better at resisting the lifting than a single "air drying" coating.

Just wanted to post a pic of my brothers helping me to resaw some genuine mahogany I picked up for the deck. This Doall saw and a nasty looking resawing blade made it pretty easy. We planed the wood, and now I'm ready to get started on the deck as soon as I can finalize my design. I'm currently thinking I'll run a light colored "racing stripe" down the middle of the boat using some maple I have. Decisions, decisions...

OK, posting a pic of my start on laminating the mahogany to the deck. I decided to put a stripe down the middle, that is made from maple. I've attached about half of the perimeter, and should finish up the perimeter this weekend. So far so good. I had to pull out all the "heavy stuff" I have laying around to help hold down the mahogany during epoxy curing where I can't easily use clamps - dumbbell weights, bucket full of clamps, 50 lb. bucket of sand, etc.

Lol. I hope its not too inconvenient to make people turn their monitors upside down to see my pics. I took another photo with my iPhone, this time making sure to have the home button on the right, let's see if that works...

A few quick pics of the mahogany planking inlays. I haven't started sanding/fairing yet, so this is still a little messy. Also, I've noticed that the color of the planks evens out quite a bit when sanded and stained. (I made a prototype with samples from the same pieces to test different stain colors.)

Aft planking inlay still in progress. I love these nifty orange spacers which I picked up at Lowes (tile spacers). They are stable and don't twist and fall into the space between the plank if the plank moves around while placing them.